Many of us in the DailyKos community recognize that something doesn't have to happen to us directly in order for us to care about the issue or situation. In addition to any moral obligation, there is also a practical consideration that we may one day find ourselves, our friends or our families in those circumstances. We don't have to be locked up in Guantanamo to realize the importance of habeus corpus. We don't have to stand 8 hours in a voting line ourselves to understand how votes can be suppressed. We shouldn't have to see people die in front of us to understand the horrors of war.
Yet having said that, it's hard for me to imagine living in a war zone. Iraq to me remains a place that's so far away and removed from my everyday life. The stories I hear about what's happening over there are intermingled with the reports on Paris Hilton and the World Cup. Often the reports from Iraq just get lost in the mix of news. The kidnapping of Iraqi civilians the other day really drove it home for me. These are people living in a country in the midst of civil war. How can we better understand just what is going on over there?
Iraq's area is 169,235 square miles - just a little more than California's 163,696 square miles. Iraq has a population of 26,783,383 compared to California's 36,132,147. Not a perfect match, but close enough for us to start thinking about some comparisons to bring it closer to home... So I wonder - what if everyday life in California today were more like what's going on in Iraq?
It is estimated that over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. That's enough to fill a whole city the size of Burbank or Berkeley. We don't even know how many civilians have been wounded, but some estimates put the number over 400,000. Think about a city the size of Sacramento or Long Beach where every resident had missing limbs, burns, or other wounds, and maybe we can begin to think differently about the numbers.
The forecast for Barstow tomorrow is 109. For Baghdad it's 113. But imagine Barstow with an average of 4 hours of electricity each day to run air conditioners. How long would we put up with that?
It's the kidnapping that really struck me. Imagine 85 Hewlett-Packard employees in Silicon Valley kidnapped by gunmen as they take the van pool or bus to work. How would that play here at home? 25 people were executed gangland-style in Iraq's third largest city. Now picture that happening in San Jose. Think about the wall-to-wall news coverage that would generate, the number of families in America that would be affected and terrorized by that event. Now we start to get an idea of what Iraqis are enduring.
I could go on, but I'll leave it to you to suggest your own comparisons in the comments. We hear how we are fighting "them" over there so we don't have to fight "them" over here. There is no us and them. Just beneath the surface most of us have the same wishes for our families and goals for our futures. How is staying the course going to help these people? What is it going to take for Americans to get it? And what would we be doing if we were in their shoes?